Ideas for Gameplay/Story Bloodstained 2

Other ideas on the world design aspect would be to make the world feel better connected with means of fast travel both between the Castle and the outside locales and between the locales themselves to help cutdown on backtracking. The Castle shouldn't be forgotten in place of the locales and should connect visually with each other, perhaps the areas of the castle that host the portal to say a jungle habitat should be full of vegetation and wildlife that fit the location with vines and such covering the marble and brickwork of the typical castle to really tie the castle to those other areas. Going between worlds to find scattered secrets and other goodies between the areas needs to feel seamless so that each world feels worthwhile to visit again.

The enemy design felt pretty lacking in Ritual of the Night possibly due to many reasons such as time constraints but also the dev team perhaps trying too hard to be original and then coming up with things like a tar monster(the Morte) which really just lacked character and presence when compared to the very well known Skeleton which offered tons of variety to the enemy design. Let those creative juices flow, hopefully the dev team gets far more time to go back to the drawing board with the enemy design even with simple things like making succubi scantily clad. Folklore is another area I see being an issue, while the 72 demons mythology is a neat concept, it becomes limiting on what you can do with it as opposed to Castlevania which may have started out purely Gothic horror but had no restrictions later on drawing from all kinds of mythologies such as Japanese and even modern horror. I wish for Bloodstained to follow in its footsteps to create more diverse enemies, bosses, NPCs, level designs, etc by drawing on different mythologies. An idea related to this is that we do have something to go off of when it comes to level design being foreign, diverse locales considering the boss designs from Curse 1 and 2 with turtle boi not being in Ritual but he can be the boss of an Atlantis Aquatic Ruins area and the Roman gladiator monster from Curse 2 being perfect to appear in a Rome colosseum, general European location, Tutankhamen from Curse 2 being Egyptian so we get an Egypt level, sexy flower girl Curse 2 we get a Jungle area, etc.

Now on a different note(puns ) we HAVE to bring up Bloodstained's music. While I thought the music for Ritual was good, I believe it could be alot better with tons of catchy tunes on the level of Portrait of Ruin and Order of Ecclesia. Think like Portrait of Ruin's: Gallery of Labyrinth, Invitation of a Crazed Moon, Looming Threat, Piercing Silence, Silent Prison, Jail of Jewels, Gears gone Awry, In Search of the Secret spell, Banquet of Madness, etc for levels of catchiness and just awesomeness. (You can tell I LOVE Portrait's sound, it's a longshot but PLEASE consider contacting Yuzo Koshiro as a sound designer for Bloodstained alongside Michiru Yamane to give us those upbeat toe-tapping tunes!)
The same goes for Order of Ecclesia songs: Rhapsody of the Forsaken, The Colossus, Empty Tome, Chapel Hidden in Smoke, Hardwon Nobility, Wandering the Crystal Blue, A Crashing of Waves, Sapphire Elegy, Lament to the Master, Order of the Demon etc. Although I like the more...I suppose atmospheric tunes of RoTN Garden of Silence and Forgotten Jade etc, we gotta have more upbeat kickass symphonic rock tunes as well as our gothic jazz and techno pieces. Lastly, when it comes to sound design, I believe using Live Orchestra actually limits the kind of sound that we crave since things like MIDI gives us overall more variety in instruments and perhaps greater control and easier editing ability. So I am fully requesting that the team uses artificial sound, Michiru and fellow sound designers are more than capable of creating amazing tunes for us on their own.

Oh and as an update to an animated Portrait of Ruin-Dawn of Sorrow style as you boot the game up cutscene, just show Miriam and Johannes kicking ass with weapons and spells being throw out, Gremory popping up somewhere in there before Miriam and Johannes break out a tag team attack(maybe that Ray of Light shards attack I mentioned in earlier post) before the scene ends. Just think that'd be so cool to see

Something else worth mentioning is a returning role for Robert Belgrade as OD obviously as a main character NPC but perhaps story sequences can be read out loud by OD as a narrator reading from a book, with him being a Librarian after all. I think it'd be a very nice touch.

Also sorry for these posts on back and forth topics I make new posts as these ideas come to me.

I forgot to make a post about the art style and graphics so here it is. Although the art style for ROTN was fine enough, it needs to have more of a distinctive style to it that looks more appealing and while I know that the concept art for the first game was perhaps done under a different direction/artist, the style for the next game should do it's best to mimic that style but simply using 3D models instead. Perhaps the best uses of this style would be Dragon Ball FighterZ or perhaps the Guilty Gear games but obviously going for a more Gothic anime look where it still uses 3D models but like with a crisp, Cel-shaded art style that mimics 2D. This would further enhance just overall how pretty the game would look especially if the game has those fully hand-drawn emoting portraits for dialogue speech like I mentioned in one of the above posts I made which I would say should be done in the style of the Curse of the Moon trailers.

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Going over a few things here, the very important topic being crafting. Also some thoughts on animations and such.

The Crafting system is flawed due to what I feel is being bloated. You absolutely need Alkahest in order to break apart items and it is somewhat expensive to straight-up buy and you gotta go back and farm maybe one or two enemies in specific areas to get more. The crafting, if brought back, should either no longer require Alkahest or make it incredibly common to get through more enemies carrying it and chests. Really this goes for all materials especially cooking ingredients, the player shouldn't have to craft basic individual ingredients like butter, milk, cheese etc and then having to do the same for the other ingredients before making the end meal. Perhaps the farmer mechanic giving the farmer seeds for a couple ingredients can be expanded on more types of seeds, maybe milk and meat.

it takes a while to get materials and by the time you get all the materials for the best weapons in the game, the game is more or less in its final phase.

Iga games having little extras is of course always a welcome addition, a fun simple one is like a music box that lets you play music(Like in Order of Ecclesia) perhaps music from Ritual of the Night(Classic mode or normal), Curse of the Moon, original stuff, etc. Not required, just a fun thought.

With enemy death animations, obviously the devs can afford to get creative with ROTN finally out of the way and basic heavy lifting under the dev teams belt.

Miriam's trademark scarf should possibly the source of her double jump and High Jump, turning into a pair of wings when performed. Each new scarf having its own animation Batwings, bird wings, angel, fairy, etc. As a side note gameplay-wise, the High Jump shard should be an entirely separate shard attained later and not required to upgrade the Double Jump to get it like in ROTN.

I am pretty tired as of writing this originally, maybe I will think of something else and edit this later. Ty

More story ideas, a separate antagonist in the form of rogue Alchemy Guild members. Perhaps the friend of Alfred who wrote the journal entries could be revealed as having survived and determined to return the Guild to power and glory(something which Johannes speculated Alfred was trying to do himself, being similar to Barlowe from Order of Ecclesia) by trying to recreate the Sharbinder experiment to create an army of obedient shardbinder soldiers. His motivations, stated at least, being that Miriam is far too powerful and too much of a wild card to not be under the control of her creators and so if she won't rejoin the Guild then he will extract her back crystal(source of her power) in order to create stable Shardbinders(the ones created so far being somewhat flawed due to effects on the mind). This sect of the guild would either be the primary or secondary antagonist in the game perhaps in an alliance with Gremory to eliminate Miriam.

Now that I think about it, this setup sounds familiar to me because it's basically the setup in the game Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door with the X-Nauts group lead by Sir Grodus helping the Shadow Sirens in resurrecting the Shadow Queen in hopes of world domination.

Having hostile shardbinders as bosses who have good dialogue and personalities before fighting them would be amazing. Imagine you just finish off a boss monster when it begins to crystalize like normal but then one of the shardbinders swoops in and steals that shard(now using the shard themselves) and you must now defeat them to gain it yourself. This could even tie in setting/story-wise as Miriam travels across different lands but encounters many former Alchemy Guild labs set up across the world where you might have an encounter with the Guild members trying to recover lost Guild archive notes and equipment. You can assume Miriam would finally confront this Guild leader as perhaps the penultimate boss or something where he fights similarly to the way Johannes would using a spellbook imbued with the crystal curse but his magic being on a much larger scale, again similar to Barlowe from OoE.

Leader: "We need alive at least for the time being so that her power doesn't leave the crystal before we extract it, after that, you may have what's left of her..."
Gremory: "At last wench, I have you now"

Anyways, I just thought this would be a very neat idea for a future game in the series. Tbh, I'm not sure if this should be the antagonist in this second game for a possible future third game. The motivations of this Guild leader could be in reaction to the events of both the first and presumably second Ritual games involving Gremory and Dominique and so this guild leader wants to take no chances with Miriam or the Demons. Sounds like it could be a good setup for a third game but idk if having this in the second game would perhaps make it feel too cluttered with characters/villains given that Dom and Gremory might return. Tell me what ya think

I can't say I'm a fan of the idea for creating an army of shardbinders. I can't explain how Dominique has accelerated crystal growth, but the bookshelf journals make it clear that crystal grows very slowly on all but children. The whole plot of the game revolves around losing control of yourself, so making an obedient army that does the will of mortals sounds very far fetched. The curse of being infused with crystal and absorbing shards is a story device that works best on a personal level, but not so much on a large scale one. If you want an evil organization that wield the power of demonic forces, there is always black magic. If there is another shardbinder in Bloodstained's future, I would really only accept Anne. She's an orphan young enough for crystal growth and Dominique had access to her. Otherwise, use the shardbinders we have. Miriam is a given, but we didn't see Gebel shatter. Johannes may have pulled him out of the castle directly after Miriam had last interacted with him. Dominique didn't enter Hell by death, she was fused with Bael, so a redemption and rescue would be cool to me. All other shardbinders were sacrificed to bring about the demon summoning 10 years before RotN. They were a costly resource, and having an army of them would be an invitation for demons to orchestrate another mass summoning.